Depts

JL of History dropped off a 2-page summary of what he and ML of library (?law) would like done to produce a Zotero / Aigaion based project to create a legal bibliography. Martin and I are not clear on what the work flows are (i.e. what is each of the two packages used for and what are the information flows between packages). We're also not clear how much editing labour is likely to be saved by the proposed modifications to Zotero, specifically whether any code could be written that would significantly reduce the amount of editor's work checking for duplicate submissions from the field. Wrote to JL and ML asking them to provide work-flow or information-flow descriptions or diagrams.

SB reported a problem with a link from her site to a job posting on the Career Services Online site. Turns out that site requires authentication to see a site, but that is set up so that one can authenticate only on a specific page and then browse to other pages on the site. So, it's cumbersome to provide instructions on how to get from her site, through this special authentication page, to the specific job posting page. Not much to be done, other than fix the way the Career Services site is working.

MH sent me two bar charts and a pie chart. He needed them turned into grey scale and some of the chart-clutter removed which I did. I couldn't figure out how to specify patterns on each pie wedge (other than getting image files of patterns and applying them to the wedges). Also, the only way to increase the size of the box in the chart legend was to increase the font size of the legend text. Did the three charts and sent them back to him for approval.

Modified htaccess file to change who is allowed to see applications to Interdisciplinary Studies degree programs.

Put in request for departmental secondary accounts chinext and asiancan. Also put in requests for a mysql database to go with each. For "administrative" projects hosted on enterprise servers, the request for mysql dbs goes through helpdesk who forwards them to sysadmin. For "research" project on HCMC servers, go directly to sysadmin.

Got request for modifications to half a dozen pages (course listings mostly) on the medieval studies site. Forwarded those to Judy, who did the work. A couple of issues came up that she asked advice on: when to delete rather than comment out code, and how to minimize the risks of invalidating the code when making structural changes (edit by drilling down through structural element,rather than sequentially character by character. simple e.g. create open and close tags for each element before putting in any content)

CC of French wanted to replace the image of a book cover with a screen snap of a research project. MH provided me the screen snap and I inserted it into the site.

LW noted that numbers were appearing on the course description page immediately before links to files for course materials. After some poking around I discovered that the code that generates the individual professor's details on the courses page had a bit of debug code that displayed the value of the loop counter on the page. Commented out that code and everything fine

Met with AWR to brainstorm possible ways of providing support for English 140. Notes from meeting appended below. Seemed to me (especially after talk with GN and MH) that Moodle would be appropriate, and that for a course of this size they could expect some time from the Moodle support people on campus.

Arranged for me to meet with SG to review their needs and confirm that Moodle could meet them, and probably at lower cost and hassle then any other option. That meeting confirmed my recommendation. The Moodle people are already supporting ENGL 135 which is a bit bigger and more unruly administratively than this course.
wrote to AWR suggesting she contact the 135 instructor and also contact SG directly to discuss the specifics and I'd be happy to consult if she felt it would be helpful.

2 lecture sections / term, each with 180 students
20 tutorial sections / term, each with 20 students
course content:
- 4 major works, each studied for 3 weeks
- 8 submissions
- exposure to range of literary study techniques
- focus on close reading (e.g. take sentence, write a paragraph)
dept:
- wants to expose students to range of scholarship, as retention tool
- wants grad students to do more teaching
- this course as model for future for other courses
profs:
- 1 professor teaches both sections in a given term
- likely 3 or 4 profs will rotate term by term
- each prof may have different usage
- each prof will want to be able to archive their material for re-use
features:
- instructor has to have site accessible to all students in course with
general course stuff and stuff specific to current work being studied
- each tutorial section has to have site (accessible to all course
students probably OK if more restrictive access administratively hard)
- mechanism for students to submit work to instructors
- mechanism for instructors to forward exemplary work to instructor for
inclusion on page accessible to all - this archive likely to be retained
and expanded from year to year
- area whose access is restricted to instructor and ta's
misc:
- not sure about instructors' confidence with Moodle

I wrote a little piece of code that identified 624 rows in BI's spreadsheet which contain values in the keyword field that don't appear in the keyword sheet, then submitted a report to BI. He'll need to update the keywords sheet and the records in the main sheet and return.
Added bit of code to identify rows which have NULL in the chapter field. It's OK to have NULL in that field, but I gave BI the report in case some of those rows should have a value in that field.
Added bit of code to identify rows which have NULL in the document_type field. It's OK to have NULL in that field, but I gave BI the report in case some of those rows should have a value in that field.